An entire generation of Americans have no idea what it was like before 9/11. We felt invincible. Kids of the 80’s had seen the end of the Cold War. Kids of the 90’s enjoyed citizenship in the unquestioned superpower on the globe. Nobody could touch us, we thought.
I had slept in that Tuesday morning, having stayed out late the night before as was my custom as a 22-year-old who worked afternoons. My roommates were out, presumably working or attending class. I had no idea what was going on. It wasn’t until I hopped in my car to head to work and flipped on the radio that I first heard mention of terrorists attacking the World Trade Center. My brain immediately processed it as a reference to the 1993 bombing that had occurred years earlier. Thinking it was some sort of retrospective, I flipped the dial… and heard them talking about the same thing.
That’s when I knew this was a real-time event. The details came in incontiguous bits. The announcer mentioned air traffic had been halted across the entire country. I leaned over my steering wheel to gaze into a big blue empty sky.
The shock of the attack cannot be conveyed to those who didn’t live through it. It was inconceivable that something like this could happen on American soil. How do four airplanes get hijacked and three flown into buildings? Why weren’t they shot down? How did the perpetrators take control of the aircraft? We were the biggest and most powerful military power on the globe and couldn’t see this coming or prevent it? Such were the questions we asked ourselves.
Slowly but surely, answers were given. But they required us to reframe our sense of security. We weren’t invincible. We weren’t untouchable. Monsters were real and they could attack anywhere at any moment.
It was into this shifting vortex of worldview that Alex Jones offered another explanation. Buildings don’t collapse like that on their own, he claimed. Look at those plumes on the side of the towers. WTC 7 is dropping at free-fall speed. Did you know there were military exercises simulating airline hijackings that morning? Steel doesn’t melt like that from fire. Didn’t you know?
As a 22-year-old contending with the new reality, I found his suggestions compelling. For a couple of years, I followed Jones’ PrisonPlanet.TV and InfoWars.com, entertaining myself with the ominous possibilities he suggested, letting his conviction play with my imagination. There was an alluring appeal to the idea that I and other listeners were “awake” to reality, in on the game, and therefore smarter or more qualified than those who had not accepted “the truth.”
But I recognized that appeal from my childhood. I had been born into a Jehovah’s Witness family, a repressive sect that similarly appeals to recruits by offering exclusive access to “the truth.” Perhaps it was that experience that kept me from fully buying into Jones’ schtick. Regardless, I eventually categorized Jones in my mind as a grifting entertainer, a carnival barker, and as such good only for amusement.
Then Sandy Hook happened, and he took things well past entertainment to a point which caused actual harm to grieving families. He paid the price, literally, ordered to pay $1.4 billion to the families he defamed. But he endured, becoming a “free speech martyr” when banned from online platforms, and re-emerging in recent years as a commentator platformed by no less than Tucker Carlson.
Jones’ power comes from the same source as all liars, plausible integration of falsehood with truth. Jones was wrong about 9/11 and Sandy Hook. But he was proven right about globalist conspiracy, which has come out of the shadows and now proudly livestreams its meetings at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He was also right about fiat money, the Federal Reserve, and the destructive impacts of reckless government spending. Indeed, some have suggested that Jones’ conflation of these ideas – fiat currency, reckless monetary and fiscal policy, global communism, and easily disprovable conspiracy theories – proves so destructive to discernment that he may be an agent of the intelligence agencies paid to discredit otherwise legitimate political dissidents. Look up “Alex Jones is Bill Hicks” on YouTube sometime if you want to go for a truly wild ride down conspiratorial entertainment.
People who deny the moon landing or suggest America is evil for its use of atomic weapons against Imperial Japan or who say that George Bush was behind 9/11 actually hate this country.
— Jeremy Boreing (@JeremyDBoreing) April 21, 2024
The takeaway from all this is that government lies and actual plots to undermine national sovereignty and individual rights from the likes of the WEF empower grifters like Jones to sell audiences on wilder and far less credible theories. Jones and his ilk would be best undermined by pursuing classical liberalism, upholding national sovereignty, and securing individual rights. That would eliminate much of the fodder he has to work with. But don’t hold your breath.
In the meantime, we each operate under the civic responsibility to apply discernment to the question of what is wild conspiracy theory and what is substantiated fact.
